Critical consciousness (CC) is the ability to understand, critique, and act against oppressive social structures and systemic forces. To assist educators in understanding and enacting strategies that foster CC, the authors identified examples of CC in third through fifth grade virtual classes of a 2020 "Children's Defense Fund's" Freedom…

Early purposes of education in the United States concentrated on preparing young citizens to understand democratic principles in order to participate in their democratic communities. Today elementary instruction has contracted in response to years of high stakes accountability measures. Social studies has not been a focus of federal accountability…

There is a significant amount of research literature on the importance of identifying and building on students' experiences and ideas for making sense of the natural world, especially when engaging in science practices. Simultaneously, approaches to creating justice-oriented science education promote the need to focus on the diverse sense-making…

Students in grades 3-5 are undergoing significant cognitive growth and beginning to understand what fairness and equity mean in a diverse and interconnected world. "Modern Math Tasks to Provoke Transformational Thinking" presents carefully crafted tasks that nurture multi-disciplinary literacies, including ecological and cultural…

Acceleration of digital communication has changed the nature of reading and young people today need to engage multimodal skills for reading success in the digital world. While historically there have been social justice issues for marginalised students in terms of reading, the digital age is creating new equity issues across the globe. This…

In this article, we provide an overview of the ways one ecosystem-based literacy program uses high quality racially affirming picturebooks with kindergarten-third grade teachers within communities of practice to develop racial literacy and enact more effective and equitable reading practices. Racial literacy here refers to teachers' ability to…

In this study, the researcher uses quantitative methods to examine the extent to which Title I funding helps public schools with large populations of economically-disadvantaged students increase student academic achievement in reading and math in grades 3-5, and whether the leaders of these schools utilize specific social justice actions…

This ethnographically-oriented, multi-year study examined an epistolary writing relationship between third grade students and the teacher's uncle, known to them as Uncle Billy, who, at the time of the study, was corresponding from prison. Taking place within a Reformed Christian school, this study encapsulates the pedagogy of Ms. Thompson, the…

Background or Context: There is increasing research focusing on dual language (DL) education program policies and practices regarding who has access to bilingualism and whose bilingualism is valued and represented. However, limited research is situated in the context of Chinese-English DL education and its service of emergent bilingual learners…

Promoting relevant, meaningful, and equitable science teaching learning environments for both teachers and students has become a critical objective for science education. To achieve this goal, fostering students' sensemaking experiences in science becomes critical. Working towards such a committed, and equitable sensemaking environment is closely…